Hey, Butterflies! While taking a short break from my stories a while back, I decided to work on a one shot in the process. I found this file again, finished it, revised it, and polished it. Here's the final product. This is a longer one shot about Dr. Miranda Grey's life that I briefly bring up throughout my fanfiction Kur Unfurled. It is written from her POV. Enjoy!
I still remember the day my parents split like it was an hour ago. I was still young, only about twelve or thirteen. We had been a fairly happy family; there were five of us: Mum, Dad, Abbey, Derek, and me. Dad was a professor at a nearby university in Cambridge, and Mum was a stay-at-home mother. My younger siblings and I were homeschooled, and we each had our own interests and talents. Abbey, who is a year younger than I, adored history with all her heart and could find information on any subject no matter how ambiguous. Derek was a robotics genius; he is the one who built the first Deadbolt, but that is a story for another time. I was into science, particularly physics and chemistry. Mum and Dad were thrilled at our interests, and they gave us our own area of the house to research in. We were happy, and nothing seemed to be able to hurt our little world. If only we had known what the future held.
According to my grandmother, she knew I was cursed from the moment I was born. She often refused to come near me lest the curse rub off on her; it hurt a lot when she did that. One of the rare times she came into the same room as me, I asked her why she believed I was cursed.
"Because, you cursed child, you were born with a ruined arm," she replied. Then she quickly left the room with a huff. By then I had learned not to cry, but I think I cried a little for the rest of the day that day. On the way home, I dared ask my parents what Grandmother had meant. That was when they explained that I had been born with a birth injury to my left arm, my dominant arm. Then Mum explained that it had healed over time and that I had no need to worry about Grandmother's comments. Oh, how I had hoped she was right.
The next day was a Monday, so Dad had to go to work. It was during a break in our lessons that the telephone rang. Mum answered it, but she started crying after she hung up. I remember asking her what was the matter, and she replied that Grandmother had just passed away. I began weeping too; even if she always had avoided me, I loved her dearly. Death strikes hard blows when it comes to fight.
It took a long time, but Grandmother's will had been sorted out. When the executor read Grandmother's will, I was shocked to find that I received nothing from her and in fact had been forbidden to attend her funeral, which was months prior to the reading. That was, I believe, when Mum truly snapped.
"You wretched child! Because of you, we've already dishonored the wishes of the deceased! Why don't you just disappear and never come back into my life, you little demon cursed by God Himself!"
Funny how I remember word for word what Mum had shouted at me that day, yet I keep forgetting where I put my keys.
After Mum's outburst at Grandmother's will reading, Mum and Dad's marriage started to fall apart. They fought about everything, even the little things. I had to put my younger siblings to bed each night, and while they slept soundly, I would lie awake and listen to the sounds of their fights. One night, Mum threw the glasses and plates she and Dad had received as wedding gifts at Dad. It was during that very fight that I decided that I would never fall in love and get married. Looking back, I do not think that my parents were a good example of how to handle grief and marriage struggles.
A few years later, my parents split, thought it was not because of the fighting. No, what had happened was I had been working in the lab when I carelessly spilled flammable chemicals near a Bunsen Burner, some of the chemicals mixed to form a flammable gas, and as I was reaching to turn off the burner, I knocked it over; the chemicals burst into flames, and soon everything in the room was catching fire. I cut the gas off the burner and started the sprinklers, but to no avail. I gave up trying to fight the fire and raced out to try and warn my family. Abbey and Derek, thank goodness, were on the lower level, but Mom and Dad were upstairs. I got all of them out, but I was trapped upstairs due to debris falling in front of the door; it never ceases to amaze me how quickly the fire spread. I remember thinking that I could either stay in the room I was trapped in and die, or I could attempt to escape through the window and hope that I would not die. In a split second, I had made my decision and started climbing down the side of house. But then I slipped and fell, and I hit the ground rather forcefully. I would later find out that I fractured my left arm in three places and tore a tendon in my right shoulder. The doctors put my left arm in a cast, but they said my right arm would be fine. That was when Derek built the first Deadbolt; he said he wanted me to have some help while my arm was in a cast. I remember when the head first popped off. Derek cried and cried, despite my best efforts to console him.
After the fire and after we had rebuilt, Mum and Dad could no longer keep their marriage together, so they split. There were countless arguments over custody and all sorts of other matters I hope to this day I never have to deal with. Eventually, things worked out that Mum got the family home and custody of Abbey, but Dad got custody of Derek and me. Dad promptly moved us back to his home country, the USA, to a city called Orono, located in Maine. Derek and I, for a while, continuously tried to stay in touch with Mum and Abbey, but either our words never reached them or they did not care. All I know is that they never responded, and they soon fell into memories of the past; Mum become Mother in a matter of years, and Dad became Father shortly afterwards.
My life with Father and Derek was okay, but I had problems that they just did not understand. And poor Derek tried to understand and be there for me, but I pushed him away. Looking back, I wish I had brought him in even closer.
After I graduated high school, Derek and Father paid for me to have a surgery to repair the tendon in my right shoulder, so it was in a sling for a while. Also after my high school graduation, I got an internship with a family friend, Dr. Steven Baleon, in California. But two days before I was sent to fly out, I got into a car crash and broke my left arm again. I still went to California, and in the California airport, I bumped into a man named Arthur. Little did I know that calamity would befall me after that meeting.
I made it to the lab, and Dr. Baleon greeted me. Then he whisked me inside to begin training. The internship was supposed to last all summer, and I was stoked. But two weeks before it was scheduled to end, I stayed in the lab late one night to finish up a report for Dr. Baleon when something started to make noise. When I went to investigate, I found Abbey, or at least I thought I did. Something felt off in my mind, as if someone had drugged me or something. When I started to approach what I was seeing, I felt someone's hands grab my neck and press on my carotid arteries. Before I blacked out, I noticed the watch and the sleeves of the jacket the person was wearing. I instantly recognized them as belonging to Arthur Beeman, the man I ran into at the airport and a fellow intern.
I remember waking up in my room, fully clothed, but seeing blood on the crotch of my pants. I knew immediately what it meant: I had been raped, my virginity taken, and had a high chance of a pregnancy. I instantly hated myself and blamed myself for what had happened to me. I thought that if I had just been more responsible and left with the others, that this would not have happened. I also remember changing clothes and going to see Dr. Baleon about leaving the internship early. He said it was possible to leave at the end of the week, but he warned me that I might not get credit for the internship. When I said it did not matter and that I just wanted to leave, he asked if I was alright. I told him what had happened, and he told me I should not have been in the lab alone at night and that I should not have let someone drug me. In that instant, I knew I had to leave.
When my flight landed back in Maine, I took a taxi home, and Derek, who was fifteen at the time, was the first one to greet me. I asked him if he would drive me to the drugstore, and he said yes. We drove to the farthest drugstore, and on the way, I explained to him what happened. Derek said it was not my fault, but he and I were both worried what Father, a biblical literalist, would say. Once at the drugstore, I bought several at home pregnancy tests, and I took them at home, while Father was at work. Every single one said I was pregnant. Father was going to kill me.
Derek helped me destroy any evidence that I had taken the pregnancy tests, but somehow Father still found out. When he did, he demanded to know the identity of my raper so that he could arrange a marriage. I refused to tell him anything. Still, he forced me to go wedding dress shopping and picked a out a blue one- blue supposedly being the color of purity. Derek talked to Father about the whole marriage conflict, and he thankfully talked Father out of it. But that did not change the fact that I was pregnant with only three weeks left in summer.
College started before I knew it, but my freshman year was not what everyone told it would be like, largely because I was carrying the product of a rape. Many times I considered aborting the pregnancy, but every time I saw the ultrasound at the doctor's or felt the baby kick, I remembered why I wanted to take the pregnancy to term. My roommate, Drew Blackwell, was extremely helpful during the pregnancy, and I'm grateful for that. Finally, the end of the year rolled around, and the day after college let out, I went into labor. I gave birth to a baby girl, whom I named Samantha. But I couldn't keep my baby. I wasn't in a position to do so, so I arranged for my cousins in Beverly Hills, California to take Samantha. Gabby, Father's third cousin, came to pick up Samantha; we agreed never to tell my baby about her origins, and Gabby's husband went as far as to change as many documents as possible to hide the truth. I feel bad about lying, but I simply could not raise a child in my situation.
My sophomore and junior years flew by quickly, but not a day passed when I did not call Gabby to check on Samantha. Derek, who was about seventeen, graduated from Yale with a PhD in robotics, yet he came to work as a teacher's assistant at my college. Also during those two years, Drew cycles through several boyfriends, one of whom I hated with a passion: Leonidas Van Rook. Senior, however, brought change. Drew kept a boyfriend all year long. It was also the first year that my college put students of different years in the same living quarters. Drew and I shared a room with a nineteen year old freshman named Jordan Penelope Beeman. Yes, Beeman, as in the same name as the man who raped me the summer before my freshman year. I would later find out that Jordan was in fact Arthur Beeman's younger sister.
Jordan, however, was nothing like her brother. She was sweet, kind, and loved life. She wanted to become a kindergarten teacher. And then she met Derek. Derek had stopped by our dorm to check on me, as he often did, and Jordan met him for the first time. One could argue that it was love at first sight for the two of them. They began dating, and it was not until years after Derek's death that I learned he had popped the question when they were twenty-one, so I was about twenty-four.
Two years later, Drew announced she was pregnant with her boyfriend's child and that she would be moving in with him. That left Jordan and me alone in the dorm. One day, Drew announced that she would be going to Iraq to do research for her thesis to earn her PhD, a degree she and I had been working on since our first day of college. She and her boyfriend, Dr. Solomon Saturday, went out in search of the Kur Stone. They were gone for several months until a day in January, when Drew called; a thief had stolen the Kur Stone.
Drew and Solomon gathered a team of fifty, myself included, and we invaded the thief's home. His name was V. V. Argost, and a sinister man he was. We, the group now called the Secret Scientists, went in with a team of fifty but came out with only seven. My brother, dear beloved Derek, was one of the ones who never made it out. It was all Solomon's fault too, but I have long since forgiven him. Drew then went into labor after we retrieved the Stone. Four children were born, but only two survived; they were months premature. Drew and Solomon put the elder girl up for adoption after naming her Lilianna Rose. I hoped Lilianna found a good home.
Later that day Drew was discharged, so we split the Kur Stone into three pieces. i got one, as a sort of compensation for the death of my brother. Then I returned to the dorm, where I came home to find Jordan looking frantic. She had been up all night, calling Derek. When she asked me if he was okay, I broke down crying. No, Derek was not okay, and neither were we. Then I went to bed for a few hours of sleep before my exam that next morning. When I woke up, it was not to my alarm, but to police. Jordan was dead, and I was a suspect.
After a long and tedious process, and a trial I shall never forget, I was acquitted. Arthur hated my guts and still believes, to this day, that I murdered his sister. Turns out, though, that Jordan had drowned herself out of grief and despair. For years I wonder why, until Iris would show up, and I would find letters revealing the secret engagement of my brother to Jordan.
Later on, Drew and I would finish our studies, and Drew would marry Solomon, whom I since called Doc. They raised Zak well, but I went to Antarctica to escape the reminders of my past. I hated myself then more than ever. Not only had I been raped and made to believe that it was my fault, but now both my roommate and my brother were dead. Everyone within the country knew what had happened to my roommate, and everyone had their own suspicions and thoughts on my guilt. I knew I would never be able to find a job, so I was at the mercy of Drew and her husband. I stayed in Antarctica for most of the year, only coming home every few years to get parts for Deadbolt. One year, when I was home for the winter,- or really summer in the Northern Hemisphere- I received a wedding invitation from an old friend of mine from Orono. The wedding was in July, on Loch Lomond in Scotland.
I went to the wedding, and I had a good time. But there, I never expected what happened to happen. I came across Leonidas Van Rook, the one of Drew's ex-boyfriends whom I hated the most. But he had changed. He was then a sweet man with a daughter named Iris, whom he had adopted. Our friendship blossomed after that, for they lived in Orono too. I began to come home more often just to spend time with him. We fell in love, and when I met Iris, I fell in love with her too. I wanted nothing more than to be part of the small family, but I was not prepared to invite myself in by proposing to Leonidas. I feared what he would have thought of that. When he finally did propose, we were camping with Iris. Leonidas had woken me up early and taken my to the edge of the lake to watch the sunrise. That was when he knelt down and asked me to marry him. I said yes with tears in my eyes. There was no photograph of the event, but I have no need of one.
Shortly after the proposal, and a year before the wedding, Iris was taken away from us by none other than V. V. Argost himself. I was shocked to see his face again and to see that he had a new henchman. When I made eye contact with the new henchman, Argost smiled as if he knew something. When I examined the face of the henchman, I saw my brother's features, but I quickly dismissed it. My brother was dead, and this henchman was only here to bring me more pain due to his similar features. Iris was taken, crying and begging, and Leo and I were left, in tears and ashamed. Leo did not speak to me for a long time after that, and I knew there was nothing I could say that would ease his pain. When we finally did speak, it was about the wedding; I had asked him if he still wanted to follow through with it. He said yes and muttered something about being able to protect me better that way. I took offense, but I acted as if I did not hear him. It would be many years until I learned that the reason Iris was taken was that Argost saw power in her and offered to teach her to control them. When Leo had refused, Argost turned to threats until at last Leo agreed.
The wedding was small, consisting of only me, Leo, a judge, and the two friends that brought us together. I wore a white jumpsuit similar to the one I usually wear, and he was in a black suit. The signing was quick, but worth it. Leo and I had agreed to keep our marriage a secret for as long as Argost lived and that we would have a real ceremony after he died. Leo and I later found out that our witnesses died after being hit by a drunk driver a few months later.
Leo and I never had a wedding night experience, and for the longest time, we had separate bedrooms. It was until our third year anniversary that we even shared a room, and our fourth when we shared a bed. For our fifth, we finally had our wedding night. I would later find out that night left me pregnant. I was scared of that night, but Leo promised that we would not do anything until I was ready. He and Derek were the only ones who knew about what happened when I was eighteen and did not blame me. I never told Leo, through, that I had had a previous daughter.
Leo took as many mercenary jobs as possible for Argost in hopes of seeing Iris again, but he never saw her. Leo also tried to save as much as he could in case he could buy Iris's freedom back. I pitched in as much as I could, but I spent so much time in Antarctica doing research. That is where I was my piece of the Kur Stone was stolen. I still remember seeing the henchman from years before as he stormed by station. He broke Deadbolt, but I managed to save the matter transporter plans. I saw the henchman-whose name I later learned was Munya- take my piece and leave. Something was up. Argost was the kind of person- or cryptid I guess- who never did anything without reason. He had taken Munya to Leo's house and had sent Munya here as well. Leo had gone to the Saturdays' house, so Argost must have known that Leo and Drew had history.
We, the Secret Scientists, worked tirelessly to get the Kur Stone back, or at least beat Argost to Kur. Little did we know that Zak Saturday was Kur. That was the information that caused everything to fall apart. Once the Secret Scientists found out, Arthur overthrew Doc and Drew as the leaders and pulled the organization out from right underneath them. I had tried to leave before things got serious, but when Arthur started making threats towards my family, I backed down. That must have been how Leo felt.
Arthur's main goal was to capture Zak and cryogenically freeze him. I immediately knew that I would be forced to act as a double agent; there was no way I could let my once good friends hurt the Saturdays. I was lucky, though, because Arthur kept me on a short leash, so to speak, and had be constantly at his side along with Talu Mizuki. From that position, I was able to anonymously alert the Saturdays to when and where Arthur was planning on capturing Zak. Of course, to prevent detection, I had to give Arthur some victories. Nobody suspected a thing.
Then the War of the Cryptids happened. I had been able to go home to Leo shortly before it happened, for our fifth anniversary, and together we came up with a plan in the event the inevitable happened. I would team with Arthur until the last second, betray him, and keep him busy while Leo would go with the Saturdays and protect them. We then decided that in the event that one of us was hurt or killed, but the other was not around, that we would keep our marriage a secret. We finalized our plan, and I had to go back to work.
"I love you, Mir," Leo had told me that day. "Please don't leave me."
"I won't leave you, I promise. I love you too, Leo." I remember I had cried.
When the War finally did happen, Leo and I followed our plan flawlessly. However, what we did not count on was Leo's death. To this day, I regret not being there with him. I was too busy holding off Arthur and his crew, but I knew the moment it happened. That was when I dropped my defenses and surrendered. Paul and David brought me back to Arthur's ship, where I was detained until it was confirmed that Zak too had died. It was a struggle to keep myself pulled together. Everything I had worked for and risked was gone, dead in a matter of minutes. It was not until later that I discovered that Iris still lived, so Drew and I went to save her. She only spoke French and seemed unable to trust us. Once she finally adjusted to us, though, she seemed okay. My poor daughter, she had no idea what had happened, for she had only heard sounds, and she had no clue who I now was to her. And then Leo's will started becoming an issue.
A copy of the old will had been found, the will Leo wrote before he and I married. I knew where the new will was, but I was scared to come forward and reveal my marriage to him. By then, I was back working for the Secret Scientists because nobody would hire me, even after all those years since the trial, so I was terrified of what everybody would think. When I finally did present the will, I did so anonymously, knowing that our secret would not be a secret much longer.
Then Iris started getting letters from Munya, who had apparently survived. She then compared a picture of Derek to a picture of Munya, and the resemblance was uncanny. I could not believe it. Either my brother never died, or Munya was just one of the seven people who could look like my brother.
A few months later, I ran away from the Secret Scientists after confirming that I was in fact pregnant with Leo's child. I ran to the Saturdays to tell them goodbye, but Arthur found me. Drew dared to face him one on one, and it costs her her life. After that, my pregnancy was revealed, so I was forced into hiding. In hiding I stay, to this day, wondering when or even if I will ever get to go home and be safe. Sometimes, if I cannot sleep, I find myself looking at the covered windows, and I swear I can hear his voice.
"I love you, Mir. Forever."